One thing that can be hard as you learn to preserve foods is understanding which methods of preservation are best for each food and for your family’s particular needs. It’s easy to dehydrate fruits and vegetables, but will your family eat them? Kimchi or sauerkraut can preserve many pounds of cabbage — so nutritious — at a time, but will your family eat them? And, if so, how will you eat them?
I want to make some notes here, and I will add to it as new things come to light, about some ways I have learned that our family enjoys prepared fruits, beans, vegetables, and meats. Many preserved foods are easy to use up; I don’t need to tell you how we use the spaghetti sauce that I can each summer or the peas and broccoli that I freeze. So, what I want to focus on here are some that many people avoid preserving and unusual ways to preserve produce. For example, I preserve some hardy vegetables in a very heavy brine. They are not fermented, merely sunk into a very salty water. This preserves them astonishingly well, but then do they still taste good? How do you use them? If you’ve used salt cod, you
Frozen asparagus, frozen snow peas: I used to avoid freezing these because they get too soft when you use them in a cooked dish later on. But I have found that they are delicious if you merely thaw them out, dry them a little (with a towel or salad spinner), and then dress them for a salad. It’s the second cooking that makes them too soggy and lifeless, rather than the freezing process itself. I say “second” cooking because they are blanched before freezing, so they are already lightly cooked.
Frozen strawberries: I freeze strawberries that have been lightly macerated in sugar. I slice them, add a bit of sugar — ours are homegrown and so they tend to be very sweet already, but the sugar draws out some moisture and makes a nice syrup. The syrup serves a couple of functions in the freezer: it prevents them from drying out or oxidizing (thereby also preserving nutrients) and it means you are not shocked when the strawberries come out of the freezer a little softer than when they went in, which is what happens to things you freeze. The texture of the defrosted strawberries in their own juice will be a little softer than the texture of macerated-but-unfrozen strawberries, and the taste will be just as vibrant and lush as summer. We use these as we would any macerated berries: on pancakes, French toast, or angel food cake, in a fruit salad, etc. Sometimes we put yogurt or whipped cream on them and eat them just like that.
Brined peas, green beans: A while ago I bought a book about preserving food without canning based on the collected wisdom of a bunch of French farmers. One of the methods involves taking sturdy vegetables such as peas (not snow or sugar snap peas, but shelling peas) and green beans and sinking them in a very heavy brine. You can keep them like this for a very long time, in my experience, without them going bad, but for a while I was sort of at a loss as to what to do with them. I used to just drop them in soups, figuring they would de-salt themselves into the soup, but they didn’t taste quite right when I did that. Now I know a better way: Drain them and boil them in clean water for about ten minutes. This removes a lot of the salt, though they will still be somewhat salty, and also removes a slightly weird flavor that they tend to get from sitting in brine for so long. Boiling them first makes them taste almost like fresh again. I recently made matar paneer with some peas I brined in 2022 by first boiling them in clean water and then draining them and cooking them in the sauce.
Sauerkraut: The first year I made sauerkraut in quantity, I admit I was hard-pressed to know what to do with it all. I think many Americans have this problem because we don’t have that much tradition of using sauerkraut and mostly think of it as a hot dog condiment? But it’s easy to make in quantity and super good for you and a great source of wintertime vitamin C, so one must find ways to use it, and some of them are surprising: sauerkraut soup; sauerkraut casserole; sauerkraut in cabbage or kale salad or cole slaw or a salat vinegret with beets and potatoes; sauerkraut as a topping on BBQ chicken pizza (trust me). My younger son didn’t always like sauerkraut; he wouldn’t eat it for a long time, and the breakthrough came with a kale salad with sauerkraut and a homemade ranch-style dressing. Now he’ll eat it most ways, although not usually by itself. Also, you can make a spicy curry sauerkraut — like kimchi, but made with European style cabbage and curry powder — and use it in place of the kimchi in this noodle recipe, and it’s incredible.